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Emanuel Swedenborg

You will hear people say Swedenborg was a radical Christian or a deep Christian and you might wonder what that means, or you should. The same kind of thing will be said about Isaac Newton and even Yeshua Bar Joseph and yet clearly there was no such thing as Christianity while Yeshua was alive (in the myth promoted by Rome). If you get to be a threat to Empire you can face a stake, a crucifix, or just ostracism and ridicule.

In this book you will find Jesuits with Rosicrucians ever-lasting or burning lights, magical rituals, alchemy and all the kinds of things Weishaupt studied with them and from his Rabbi father before them, in his life. Yes, smart people study and attempt to learn from those who have studied knowledge and wisdom before them, that is a definite fact! You will hopefully have read how much impact Swedenborg made on a person who was the Arch-Druid of OBOD in the thread on William Blake. I will delve into his influence on George Washington some more. Remember there is code in them thar hills and gold can come to those who need it, or wisdom to those who do not. That does not mean money is bad or that you can have all of it you want through applying the Principles of Attraction or Vibration. You might have to browse some on your own to get into this book I am about to link herewith.

The central figure in the particular writing may be Theosophy as it relates to Emanuel Swedenborg and Masons - but the root of these insights and the heresy trials are all a factor. It shows why there still were Inquisitorial trials in Spain at this time. It shows why Blasphemy Laws in England still existed when I was born and still exist in some places in 2015. It shows why people are encouraged and prevented from exploring real truth and factual explorations in the present day.

"In the late 1780s and early 1790s, when Blake sought out Swedenborg and other mystical and occult sources, he was also a radical in politics. Most noticeably, he wrote a eulogy to The French Revolution (1791), which was originally planned in seven books, and celebrated the liberation of the thirteen colonies in America: A Prophecy (1793). Traditionally, scholarship has separated Blake’s interest in occultism from his political radicalism. One branch of Blake studies (originating with another great poet of the occult, W.B. Yeats, and reaching its apex in Kathleen Raine), sees Blake primarily as a researcher of mystical sources; whereas a line fathered by David Erdman glosses over the mystical influences in order to draw a picture of a political Blake, whose writings reflect directly on contemporary events in a straightforward manner. However, studies by E.P. Thompson, Jon Mee and Marsha Keith Schuchard have encouraged us to bring these two lines together. [4] The essay at hand proceeds from the historical precepts brought to light by these scholars and aims to show that the rationalistic ideologies of Voltaire or Thomas Paine were not alone in fuelling radical or revolutionary programmes. What I intend below is a historical investigation of how the reception of how Swedenborg’s esoteric teaching was absorbed into the socio-cultural matrix of the late eighteenth century to become a platform for opposition politics. This, in turn, will give us cause to re-evaluate the motivation behind the “radical” Blake’s affiliation with the Swedenborgians in the New Jerusalem Church.

.... In Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788), which Blake owned and annotated, Swedenborg elucidates at length how the Divine in the natural universe has been obscured by the churches. He complains how “all the Things of Religion, which are called Spiritual, have been removed out of the Sight of Man,” by “Councils and certain Leaders in the Church.” They have mislead Christians to “blindly” believe that being born to a “natural” world, they cannot perceive anything “separate from what is natural.” To preserve their worldly privileges, these religious tyrants have conned their subjects into believing that the “spiritual” world “transcend[s] the Understanding.” They deceive man with the explanation that “the spiritual Principle to be like a Bird which flieth above the Air in the Æther where the Eye-sight doth not reach”; but, Swedenborg counterattacks, the spiritual principle of the world (“By the Sight of the Eye is meant the Sight of the Understanding”) is visible to those who break the mental restrains superimposed by the churches. The spiritual world is “like a Bird of Paradise, which flieth near the Eye, and toucheth it’s Pupil with it’s beautiful Wings, and wisheth to be seen.” [14]
.....a reviewer in the Monthly Review of May 1787 assessed Swedenborg’s doctrines for their appeal to radical thinking:

'They are the harmless ravings of a spiritual, but disordered fancy … the Baron’s writing will neither create a schism in the church, nor a rebellion in the state … for Swedenborg knew nothing of that dark and dangerous fanaticism which under the specious pretence of a spiritual commonwealth, endeavoured to sap the foundations of all lawful government … Let men enjoy their influxes: let them converse with their angels … If they suffer us to sleep in peace, let them dream on. (435)'

We see here how the memory of the constitutional havoc wrought by sectarianism in the previous century haunted the public imagination of a politically unstable age. The conclusion reached by the reviewer is however comforting. In comparison with the fanatical religious sectarians who gave their support to Cromwell’s Commonwealth, Swedenborg’s writing is acquitted. It does not constitute any real danger; Swedenborg is seen as too eccentric to excite insurrection among the people. Yet the need to assess Swedenborgianism for its potential threat to monarchy and the Government is an indication that the early members were those who were believed to be likely to be taken in by democratic ideologies.

After the Revolution in France had struck fear into the hearts of English conservatives, evaluations of Swedenborgianism were not always so favourable. In the debate over the dissenters’ campaign for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, some Anglicans feared that amendment of the current laws would result in an uprising among: the numberless multitude of Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Muggletonians, Swedenburgians [sic.], New-Light-Men, Sandemanians, and the various motley description of modern Schismatics aided by the Turks and Infidels of all names and nations, with Lord George Gordon at their head and Jewish priests sounding the horns of sedition in his train. [15]

Interestingly, Swedenborgianism is erroneously seen to originate with seventeenth-century sects, which were popularly connected with the social upheaval of the Civil War – although Swedenborg’s theosophical writings, of course, appearing nearly a century later. The comparison with the radical Lord Gordon, the instigator of the “Gordon Riots” in 1780, only reinforces the sense of political danger the Swedenborgians were seen to constitute.

Masonic Swedenborgianism

The prevalence of an unmistakable political dimension in Swedenborgianism warns us not to limit the scope of our understanding of Blake’s motives for seeking out the New Jerusalem Church only to questions of theology. There are undeniable links between the reading of Swedenborg and radical activity, centered on a branch of radical Freemasons who operated internationally, but gathered in London. [16] However, it has been obfuscated largely due to the historian on the early developments in the New Jerusalem Church, Robert Hindmarsh."

Will I find reason to describe what 'visions' are or from whence they come, again. I am not sure, I will but this man is also called a Prophet and he had 'visions' which appear to be more than simple dreams.

"On the Society at Avignon; see Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 97-120. Pernety was one of the earliest admirers of Swedenborg, producing a series of very bizarre and conspicuously inaccurately translations of the prophet’s works into French. He had published a French version of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell in Berlin in 1782. An insight into the reception of Swedenborg in the Society was made available in Observations sur la Franc-Maçonnerie, les visions de Swedenborg, which was published by the Society at Avignon in 1786."

There is certainty that the Cathar legacy of the northern Troubadours is at work in his studies. Pernety and Pasqually formed an Illuminati group.

It is absolutely certain we will see the symptoms of power and religiosity or heresy trials as well as a continued paradigm thinking which remains. So when we see another group with a name including Illuminati - do not assume any nonsense related thereto. Pernety founded such a group and the quote above may be correct in saying "very bizarre and conspicuously inaccurately translations of the prophet's work". It is more likely that the source of that quote is also not informed or illuminized. Maybe we will see, maybe not.

But I do find a thesis of recent date which might shed some light so we can see.

Whether or not I find my usual quoteworthy or on point material I find the words of acknowledgement to Paris and research are inspiring.

"Writing this dissertation has been one of the greatest, most challenging and fantastic experiences of my life. When I became a PhD student at Umeå University in September 2009, I had no idea that I would spend a whole year in Paris, or that I would get used to reading French manuscripts under chandeliers, next to golden murals. I could not imagine that I each Sunday would be drinking coffee at the Café Procope – the old hangout of the philosophes – or that I would attend classic concerts at the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the remains of the once great abbey of the Maurists. These years truly have been an amazing journey – personally as well as professionally. And I have not done it alone.

I am deeply grateful to my three supervisors: Mohammad Fazlhashemi, who always has believed in me and my project, and given me free reins to follow my ideas and instinct, whatever they have been; Caroline Boucher, who has been the most important, indefatigable and meticulous reader and commentator on contents as well as the French language. Words do not suffice to express my gratitude for everything that you have done, or the respect I hold for your learning and eye for details; Daniel-Odon Hurel, who not only introduced me to the academic world in France and welcomed me to LEM (CNRS) and CERCOR, but who also supplied me with an abundance of useful material on the Maurists, shared his expertise, patiently answered all my questions, and put me in contact with other researchers. I could not have written this dissertation without the three of you."

When I find so many published and supported academics of older vintage saying someone is "strange" and "bizarre" as well as a founder of an Illuminized group and Swedenborg I am interested to say the least. When I see only one scholar has looked into a massive collection of Pernety's work I am more intrigued as to what might be found and whether or not this one person knows how to decode or interpret what is here.

"I stumbled over the announcement that Dom Pernety and Dom Brézillac were working on a universal dictionary of arts, crafts, and sciences. Well aware that Diderot and d’Alembert became editors of the Encyclopédie the same year, I found the simultaneousness intriguing. I mentioned the report in my master’s thesis but I did not have the time to investigate further the fate of the dictionary project.36 Since it was absent in all bibliographical catalogues mentioning Pernety and Brézillac, I simply concluded that it never was published.37 For all I knew at this point in time, it might never even have left the planning stage. The fact that I had not found a single reference to the enterprise in earlier research on the Congregation also seemed to point in that direction. When I became a PhD student in September 2009 I first intended to expand the study on the Maurists’ publications on sciences and arts. However, unable to let go of the thought of the dictionary of Pernety and Brézillac, I contacted the Manuscripts Department of the BnF and asked if they had any material corresponding to the description of Fortet. A couple of weeks later I received a response. The Department had six volumes registered as ‘Material for a Dictionary of arts and sciences, by Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety’.38 A month later, I arrived to Paris. After having examined the manuscripts I decided to devote my dissertation to their contents and history of production.

To the best of my knowledge, only two scholars have previously mentioned the manuscripts’ existence. Each came across the material while investigating other subjects. Consequently, neither of them described it more than superficially or had time to investigate its history of production. The first was the Encyclopédie-specialist Jacques Proust who mentioned the material in his classic study of the dictionary of Diderot and d’Alembert (1965). In a chapter devoted to the origins of the encyclopedic spirit he remarked that not even the monasteries seemed to have escaped the ‘contagion’ of Enlightenment thought. He then briefly described a ‘strange’ document at the Manuscripts Department in Paris:

The Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France possesses a strange document, undated but seemingly not posterior to the publication of the first volumes of the Encyclopédie. It consists of rather short articles on arts and crafts, written on loose slips of papers, pasted on bound sheets. These articles are based on the best sources: Réaumur, the memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, the Journal de Trévoux, the clockmaker Le Roy. The technical terms are generally accompanied by definitions and illustrated by some sort of ‘plates’. These plates are cut-out engravings or drawings made by plume, rather clumsy and sometimes shaded by lead pen. Articles and drawings obviously have the same author. This man is otherwise known by the ‘encyclopedic’ works he published between 1758 and 1790: Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernetty [sic], Benedictine.39

After this account, Proust never returned to the subject.

The second person to mention the manuscripts was the historian Micheline Meillassoux-Le Cerf who in 1988 defended her dissertation on Dom Pernety. Even though she concentrated on the last twenty years of his life, she seized the opportunity to make an inventory of the material preserved in his name. On one page, she briefly described the dictionary manuscripts, and just like Proust she chose to present them as ‘strange’."

Perhaps it is 'strange' to them that one man can be so knowledgeable. What is strange to me is how little time is spent addressing anything 'illuminized' or relating to his involvement in a group with the important city of Avignon in it.

" The preserved manuscripts of Pernety mostly derive from the 1760 onwards.170 However, the Index volume contains a testimony note written and signed by Pernety, dated in 1748. The content has no apparent relation to the dictionary and seems to have accidently ended up on the backside of a working list. Still, this means that there is a contemporary sample that can serve as comparison.171

NH-1/MP-1 corresponds perfectly with the testimony written by Pernety. The most illustrative example is perhaps the /D/ and /P/ in the signature ‘Dom Pernetty’ and the title of volume four: ‘Dictionary of mathematics and physics, arts and crafts’. Also /r/, /y/ and /n/ correspond perfectly (see Figure 6, 7, and 9). Consequently, of one thousand four hundred folios, Pernety is responsible for about five hundred, that is, a third. He mainly treats arts and crafts, natural history, mathematics and physics, but has at some point treated all the subjects occurring in the manuscripts written by the other handwritings. He also is responsible for the drawings, some of the illustration lists, and the bibliography. His handwriting can furthermore be seen editing articles made by other handwritings, making additions in the margins or intervening in the structure of the text, which makes him appear as the editor in charge.172 "

I will return to this thesis from time to time probably. It is clear to me that Pernety was indeed involved in the alchemical arts just as Langue D'Occamy means Language of Alchemy and many other connections he saw relating back to early Christian monasticism like the Essenes of the family of Jesus (Merovingians like Yeshua and James and other actual brothers or half brothers). You should already know these Hermetic studies are what Swedenborg is involved with just as Isaac Newton, Ashmole and other Royal Society people have been. The mention of Frederick II is also of great importance.

"Dom Pernety

Against this background it is necessary to remark that Dom Pernety has been largely excluded from earlier research on the Congregation of Saint-Maur. Instead he has predominantly been studied by historians of freemasonry and esotericism. In 1758 Pernety namely published two works on hermetic philosophy and alchemy. A decade later he left the Congregation for a post as royal librarian for the King Frederick II of Prussia. While in Berlin, he started frequenting esoteric circles and devoted himself to the mystical writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). He later returned to France were he founded a secret society in Avignon, the Illuminés d’Avignon, which got some one hundred followers. The society has been described in terms of heterodox Catholicism, where the members aspired to live like the first Christians but also practiced alchemy and communicated with spirits.49
The literature devoted to Pernety’s later life and esoteric interests is abundant. The majority has been written by persons themselves engaged in esoteric movements or historians primarily interested in freemasonry"

Though a reader might find pearls of wisdom I have missed related to the importance of knowledge and dictionaries to making man free of the Dark Ages and religious enslavement associated with it, I am satisfied to leave the thesis with this comment near it's end.

" By exposing and describing theoretical and practical knowledge, dictionaries in general had both educational and entertaining elements. They were also concerned with how to use words properly, which was necessary for engaging in civil dialogue in the salons, coffee shops, masonic lodges, societies, academies, and other learned social settings. Since dictionaries fundamentally were based on the books of others, Richard Yeo has regarded them as expressions of ‘the modern assumptions about the public character of information and the desirability of free intellectual and political exchange’.800 As an illustrated compilation of the scientific books of its time, the Maurist enterprise can be inscribed in this larger culture of science and entertainment, sociability and commercialism.

In the preface to the Dictionnaire portatif de peinture (1757), published shortly after the abandonment of the greater enterprise, Pernety seized the opportunity to speak his mind about the role of the dictionary in a century when ‘people wish to know everything, or rather talk about everything’. Would the ‘universal dictionary of arts, crafts, and related sciences’ ever have been finished and published, perhaps these or similar words would have served as its introduction. A closer look at this preface can therefore shed some light on the values permeating also the preceding enterprise.

Pernety starts by addressing the long-debated issue whether or not the dictionaries only encourage superficial learning. Here one can almost hear the warning voice of Dom Mabillon, who in 1691 had pointed out that a restless, flickering search for amusing facts – driven by curiosity – never could lead to true and well-founded knowledge.801 Pernety acknowledges that there always will be those who only stay at the surface of things, but he still defends the dictionary as a fundamental tool for learning. Its function is to excite the curiosity or ‘natural appetite’ of the reader to such a degree that he (or she) will turn to other books for more complex answers. In order to do this, the reader first needs to be instructed in the ‘foreign’ language of the specialized field. In this way, the dictionary is portrayed as fundamental for the progress of the sciences and arts – which is of benefit to everyone. Therefore, Pernety argues, ‘we must give in to this taste of the century’."

Avignon was the site of a Cathar horror and the burning of an estimated 250,000 men, women, and children singing hymns to the "living love of Jesus" which we found the Dominican 'Hounds of Hell' involved in. So this link may or may not bear fruit in our study of Swedenborg.

A link to a book addressing Elias Ashmole also might offer some interesting insights to Gnosticism. The whole site has the beginnings of a Michigan State investigation of things related to the hermetic gnostic continuum. The title of the book indicates exactly what I think Gnosticism is derived from via Lake Urmin and earlier the Sidhe and DNN - the Magus like Simon Magus of the Gaedhils. And as you know I have written many books on them and their related Troubadours, Cathars and the Grail legends going back into the deep reaches of history now being uncovered in archaeology such as Dolni Vestonici and the work of Gimbutas or Wayland-Barber.

Admirers of Tobias Churton’s previous books, such as The Gnostics, The Golden Builders and The Gnostic Philosophy, will not be disappointed by his new biography of one of the most remarkable men England has ever produced: Elias Ashmole, founder member of the Royal Society, Windsor Herald, Astrologer to the King, Alchemist, Hermeticist, early Freemason, founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and a “mighty good man”, as his contemporary the antiquarian John Aubrey called him.

Surprisingly this towering figure has had relatively few books devoted to him, the main previous one being C.H. Josten’s massive edition of Ashmole’s writings, published in five volumes by Oxford University Press in 1966, which Churton builds on and acknowledges as “the masterpiece of Ashmole studies”. Perhaps this scarcity of biographies is due to the difficulties of encompassing such a many-faceted figure, “a Renaissance man”, as Churton puts it, “in an era that was slip-sliding away from the limitless ambition of the Renaissance philosophy of human dignity”. Another reason may be a tendency in certain circles to denigrate Ashmole’s contribution to learning. “Ashmole ‘gets in the way’ of a neat classification of eras of knowledge. He is a Renaissance magus-type yet still a rational mathematician and founder member of the Royal Society. He is historically ‘inconvenient’.”

It is clear from these quotes that the author passionately admires Ashmole and the world view that he represents. Churton also has certain things in common with his subject. Both went to Brasenose College, Oxford, and both grew up in Lichfield in Staffordshire – Ashmole was a generous patron of Lichfield’s great cathedral and managed to save part of its library from destruction by Cromwellian vandals during the Civil War. Churton believes that Ashmole has much to teach the present age, which he clearly regards as a decadent one and frequently says so in his eloquent, sometimes abrasive and often witty manner.

“Ashmole would have borne an informed contempt for the ‘modern’ or its twisted offspring, the ‘post-modern’. Rather, we are all part of a living tree whose roots feed us vital sap from the past. That a thing was past did not mean that it ceased to be; rather the present and the future were utterly contingent upon the life that flowed through all time. The folly of man was to forget the reality that all that has been is. ‘It’ is in our eyes, our ears, our homes, our dreams, our aspirations, our blood. {And that blood is often San Graal}The memory required jerking from time to time – that was a task for the antiquarian. Nothing is dead unless it has been killed.”"

I know William Wynne Westcott studied Swedenborgian alchemy or hermetics and founded the Golden Dawn. Personally I do not consider Swedenborg alchemical at all, but he taught people to study it I suppose. There is a free book on this Magus here already and I have connected George Washington and other founders of the Enlightenment with this through line that Swedenborg is only a small part of or I have not seen where he actually added much to the genre despite many people studying his work who have added a great deal to our collective enlightenment. Through Westcott one can draw lines back and forward to almost all the adepts of the last three centuries. His Sepher Yetzirah is even more popular than it should be.

The Swedenborg claims to be able to visit Heaven and Hell at will are patent psychopathy or beyond my desire to travel further into his thinking, at least. His influences are many including Balzac (Crowley and the Hellfire Club) and Baudelaire as well as those I have mentioned.

If you have not been down this road - it is worth reading, and maybe a little more than that.

I apologize for my earlier disgust with the Heaven and Hell comments. I should know better the nature of the projections and how seductive they can be. I agree with the Jesuit pope John Paul II when he said (in 1999) that they created Heaven and Hell and that we too can make our lives whichever of these falsehoods we choose. I probably should try to explain how many Royals like Frederick of Prussia or William of Hesse are all part of an elite even more foul than either Hell or the Devils that can be called forth and sometimes (When the victim or society at large ) accepts their projections and vile offerings become a reality like a genocide as allowed in the elite manual of the Benjaminites called the Halakah but I have done that a whole lot.

Thus I will offer a little of the game inside this circle of disinfotainment which hides behind the Jewish nonsense and occasionally forfeits the lives of these lesser Jews who have catered to the tables of the elites. I should give it to you and at the same time tell you it is largely projected lies and deceit. But if you want you can do what Swedenborg did and manifest the imagery as you are brainwashed to believe. Dom Pernety, or Pasqually and many names these illumine or illuminati or alumbrados may take; all serve a purpose you will not get to know until you are at the top rung of the pile of whatever you wish to call it. They let the sheep think it is what the sheep fear (Devils and the like) and thus they maintain a shield of secrecy with a host of great and often Noble (Royals and politicos) people to run interference in front of them telling things with great hesitancy and letting the leaders of the sheep (priests or whatever pulpit-pounder proselyte name you like) enjoy whipping the rabble into a frenzy about. It makes a high incentive to get higher up in the orders and yet, sometimes I am not sure the truth was even left by whoever started the game of charades.

Here is a low level example of the jargon or degrees in the hierarchy.

A book saying Jesus and Moses (in the title) are Shamans is coming out. It is true they are adepts and all adepts began as shamans well over a million years ago. Unfortunately this book is based on wild hallucinations or channeling by Swedenborgian. Or so the review says. If you read it and he gets the age of man's evolution somewhat correct you might want to check the references as to whether Swedenborg knew humans were evolved and conscious over three and a half million years ago.